A moment after he occupied a chair, the video screen brightened from black to blue. Within a few seconds, Artimis appeared. For one named after the Greek goddess of the moon, she had the right look: olive complexion, an exquisite face, midnight-black hair, and dark eyes bright with intelligence. She was dressed in lab whites, though she could have worn whatever she chose.
Ganesh, who liked most women and cherished beauty, would have preferred that they meet face-to-face, but that was not practical. Artimis Selene was in a portion of the facility that required a dust-free environment. Entrance to that zone necessitated a four-step decontamination process, beginning with a long exfoliating shower and followed by three increasingly tedious procedures that took an hour to complete.
“Dear Ganesh,” she said, “it’s always a pleasure to see you.”
“Likewise, Artimis. I know how busy you are, so I always feel as if I’m keeping you from important work.”
“Work that you’ve given me. I’m grateful to have it. You know how I am, Ganesh—work is everything to me. I assume by now Wendy Sharp and Cricket have been resettled with new identities?”
“Yes, they’re very happy. They have their own house, and the monthly stipend allows Wendy to work forty hours a week instead of sixty. Of course, I’m not at liberty to say where we put them.”
Artimis smiled. “Not even to me. I understand. I’m happy just to know they’re happy. Have they gotten a dog?”
“They have, yes. But I’m not—”
“—at liberty to say what breed. Dear, do you sometimes wonder if too much security is hampering us in this search for the Other?”
“Frequently. But I don’t make the rules, and neither do you.”
Project Olivaw had been conceived for its own purposes, not to find the Other, but now finding him obsessed Artimis and everyone on the staff. They hadn’t even known the Other existed until they were up and running, fourteen months earlier, whereupon evidence of his activities rapidly mounted. He was a ghost on the internet, passing through firewalls that were impervious to everyone else, spiriting through data archives. For years, he’d been leaving messages in the email and voice mail of scientists, politicians, and various shapers of the culture. These critiques ranged from solemn to snide to scorching. Scores of IT-security specialists tried to track him, each suspecting a different perpetrator, none realizing a single troll was tormenting hundreds of individuals, corporations, and agencies. No one could identify or locate him. Only Project Olivaw possessed the sophisticated analytics, the depth and breadth of understanding, to see patterns that proved beyond doubt that this was the work of one person, whom they dubbed “the Other.” However, even the investigative power of this project couldn’t find him.
Over the years, the Other’s taunts had become increasingly judgmental and then subtly threatening. During the past four months, he’d become violent. Seven people had been executed by someone who, in five instances, invaded the victims’ home electronics and made ingenuous use of internet-connected devices and systems to kill with gas leaks, electrocution, and raging fire. Two were obliterated when attacked by very target-specific top-secret military weapons in orbit high above the planet, which the Other had commandeered and employed with ease; Harley Spondollar, in Oregon, once the treasurer of Xanthus Toller’s Restoration Movement, who embezzled seven hundred thousand dollars from the cult, would also have been a victim if he hadn’t stepped outside, ostensibly to gaze at the stars, mere minutes before his house was reduced to fine-grain rubble.
The search for the Other had recently acquired an ever greater urgency, because they could find no way to block him from weapons platforms in space, which he might at any time use for a purpose more horrific than individual assassination. The three legs of the nuclear arsenal—aboard submarines, stealth bombers, and mobile ground platforms—had never been linked to the internet and were therefore, thank God, beyond his control.
Curiously, his seven victims had two things in common. Each had been sucked into the Restoration Movement at one time or another. And all of them had eventually broken away from it.
By questioning Xanthus Toller and his exotic followers, agents of Project Olivaw were able to determine a third thing common to all victims: Each had been at odds with another cultist, Asher Optime, whose fanaticism frightened them and who hated them for being what he called “heretics masquerading as true believers.” He had accused them of being as stupid as they were spineless, and he’d harassed them relentlessly.